


Promise

by athena_crikey



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Angst, Closure, Gen, fluff (or as close as Saiyuki can get to it), h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 11:06:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12011415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: Now he knows the truth: they’re all so fucking fragile. Post-Reload (manga).





	Promise

A wet dampness against the side of his face. The smell of blood and incense. An empty darkness, stretching out before and behind him. 

Sanzo snaps upwards, tearing fragile muscles and ligaments, crying out with what breath remains in his lungs. He collapses backwards nearly as fast, agony scorching its way through his abused and broken body. 

Strong hands catch his shoulders; he tries to grasp at them but his arms refuse, twitching traitorously on cold wooden floorboards. He remembers the sound of bone breaking, the wet crunch of it in the night. Remembers the pain, now a shadow of its former self. 

“Sanzo?” Goku’s voice is quiet, cautious and tentative. The weight of his hands falters, then falls away.

There’s almost no light to see by; all he can make out is a shadow above him. But he doesn’t need sight to know the monkey – he could be blind and would still know his presence. It’s the way Goku’s heart sings out to his: _Sanzo, Sanzo, Sanzo._

He turns his head away. 

The blood he smells is his, he knows now. A parting gift of Ukoku’s, the same one he left Goku with weeks ago: the smell of gunpowder and crimson splattered across the cobblestones. 

It’s that gift that Sanzo went to return in kind, striking out on his own with the sole intention of cutting Ukoku down. 

And look how goddamn well _that_ had turned out. 

“What happened?” he asks, voice rusty. It’s easier to focus on the present than the past, than the mess he made of his quest for retribution, than his biting failure. 

“You passed out. I carried you here. Hakkai ‘n Gojyo are sleeping,” he adds. He dabs at Sanzo’s cheek with something wet; a dampened cloth, doubtless, trying to remove the drying blood. 

_Last one down the mountain loses_. Sanzo remembers the declaration, made less in the euphoria of victory than out of a burning need to find his former strength. Another failed bid. “I lost,” he says, flatly.

“Yup,” agrees Goku cheerfully. “We kept going for a while, but the hill was real steep an’ we found this old shrine, so we stopped. Hakkai said he’d heal you up some more tomorrow.”

“Hn.” He’s dying for a cigarette but he can barely feel his hands; there’s just a sensation of cold on the far side of a hell of a lot of pain. Goku keeps wiping his cheek with the cloth, motions unusually tender. “Stop that,” he orders, irritably. Goku pauses for a moment, then keeps going. 

“You’re all bloody. If you don’t clean up some big bear’ll come and eat you up.”

“I don’t need mothering.” 

Goku doesn’t stop; his voice has a hitch to it now, roughness like a riptide under his cheerfulness. “Hakkai said you tried to look after me. Before; when I was shot. That you wouldn’t let go of me.”

For an instant it stops his heart. The memory of the gun’s retort, of Goku falling, of warm blood on his hands. 

“So won’t’cha let me take care of you?”

“I left,” he says. _Left you lying in the dirt, dying_. At the time he had had only one burning need: to repay violence with violence. It wasn’t until he felt the flare of the Seiten Taisei that he’d come back to earth and realised what he’d left behind. 

“And now you’re back.” Goku says the words easily, without hesitation or constraint. As though Sanzo had never left, as though the past few weeks had been a dream. “You wanted revenge. That’s not like you.” He hums lightly. “We knew you’d be back.”

Revenge? At the time all he knew was a shredding, gut-rending need to destroy something. A need to find the one who had cut Goku down and _end_ them. And then, when the initial fury had cooled, his determination had been fueled by steely certainty instead: Ukoku could not be allowed to live. A renegade Sanzo, working to revive an enemy of Heaven? Unpardonable. 

That’s the story he told himself. He was carrying out divine retribution, not a single man’s quest for vengeance.

He’s no longer so certain of that. 

Things had been so easy in the days when he truly believed he had nothing to protect. When he’d had faith in Goku’s ability to survive a natural disaster unscathed, when he believed he’d surrounded himself with unbreakable objects.

Now he knows the truth: they’re all so fucking fragile. 

“Don’t say it like I’m some goddamn bad penny,” he says at last, exhausted by the pain and the dizzy spinning of his own thoughts. He closes his eyes, and for a few minutes there’s nothing but the sensation of Goku carefully washing the blood from his skin. 

“Hey, Sanzo?” Goku’s voice is quiet but steady. His hand stops moving and for a moment there’s complete stillness. His fingers are warm against Sanzo’s temple, feathered under his sweat-dampened hair. 

“Hn.”

“I’ll make you a promise: I won’t leave first, if you don’t either.”

For a moment he can hear the echo of Goku’s former assertion in his ears, the assurance and certainty in his voice the same now as it was then: _I think I’d be okay with it._ A commitment to the finality of death, an instant before it was rained down on him. 

Sanzo opens his eyes. A glimmer of moonlight is shining on Goku’s diadem, painting a silver streak across the gold. “Make sense, monkey. One way or another, one of us will be the first to leave.”

“It won’t be me,” says Goku, stubbornly. “And it had better not be you. Promise?”

He had told Ukoku that he had his own definition of Muichi Motsu. He knows now that he can never hold nothing – that believing he did was nothing more than his own hubris. He’s not alone; he hasn’t been since that day on Mt Gogyou. Maybe now, after everything that’s happened, it’s time to finally accept that. 

Maybe now, it’s time to finally let himself accept it. 

Sanzo closes his eyes and relaxes against the warmth of Goku’s hand. 

“Hn. I promise.”

END


End file.
